This lost a few paragraphs when it appeared on State.ie in September 2012, perhaps understandably. Here it is, then, in its full, undiluted glory...
Bob Dylan Tempest (Columbia)
In many ways, Bob Dylan’s new album, his 35th studio
recording in a 50 year career, is unreviewable, as almost any record he
releases at this point in his illustrious and storied career would be. (Not
that this has prevented every soi-disant
rock scribe, including this one, from queuing up to get their tuppence worth
in). I mean this not in the general way Roland Barthes isolates in ‘Blind and
Dumb Criticism’, whereby ‘Critics…often use two rather singular arguments: the
first consists in suddenly deciding that the true subject of criticism is
ineffable, and criticism, as a consequence, unnecessary; the other…in
confessing that one is too stupid, too unenlightened to understand a work
reputedly philosophical’; nor indeed, conversely, in the even larger sense
Susan Sontag rails against in ‘Against Interpretation’.
Specifically, a
contemporary Bob Dylan album of new material is difficult, if not impossible,
to review because of whatever relationship it will occupy with his singular
and, in terms of innovation, unrivalled back catalogue. This complication of
comparison with past work, a mostly useful commonplace of critical discourse,
applies to Dylan in a way it doesn’t to most other artists; it is also
applicable not only to his ’60s heyday, but almost as much to his ‘revival’,
which has been going on now for at least the past 15 years. It’s quite a
pitfall too, because it pertains equally to reviewers who opine ‘it’s as good
as his best’ as it does to those who argue ‘it’s fine, but it’s not as good as
his best’. (Now watch me fall into the second trap, and then try to drag myself
out of it.)
The only sane
response to this conundrum is to yell loudly: ‘How could it be?’ (as good as
his best, that is). It hardly needs me to reiterate that those mid-’60s albums Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde, didn’t just revise the
rules, but changed the entire game, as regards how people produce and consume,
make and think about, popular music, even people who don’t know about them or
have never heard them. As Greil Marcus has written, that trilogy ‘…ranks with
the most intense outbreaks of 20th century modernism.’ Equally, and
without wishing to indulge in hyperbole, it is debatable whether or not a more
viscerally honest, nakedly raging, poetic account of emotional turmoil has been
committed to disc than Blood On The
Tracks, before or since. Add to the weight of ‘How could it be?” the fact
that Bob has mostly spent the years since these colossal watersheds in retreat,
exploring, but hardly redefining or amalgamating, genres – blues, country,
early rock’n’roll, some folk, a little jazz – which already existed prior to the
musical revolution he instigated.
Thus, witness the
ridiculousness of the attention-seeking, gormless Paul Morley claiming, on
BBC’s Culture Review, that Tempest is as good as Blonde On Blonde or Blood On The Tracks, albums one suspects he is more familiar with
by reputation than experience. Consider also the normally perceptive Allan
Jones, a man who really should know better, who in a breathlessly florid review
in Uncut awards Tempest a 10/10 rating. So it’s a perfect (storm of a) record then,
is it, Big Al? No, it isn’t. (This is the obligatory part of a Dylan review
where I slag off other reviews.)
Perhaps reactions
like those highlighted are just symptomatic of the mainstream media's tendency
to over-praise standard Dylan material now in over-compensation for all those
years in the ’80s and ’90s they spent writing him off as a has-been. Indeed, it is amusing to observe the more
right-on elements of his audience, in their nervous revisionism, referring to
his fundamentalist, evangelical Christian output as his ‘gospel’ period. As for
the ‘fine, but not as good as his best’ wing, of which I am here pretty much
one: as can be gleaned from the above argument, you aren’t really saying
anything that isn’t patently obvious. Or did you really expect him to keep
getting better with every new release? Or even to equal a run of creative
excellence that few if any have equaled since, so that one can trot other that
other great critical cliché, the ‘real return to form’. So, thank you for your
valuable input. As for those who will think Tempest
crap, well they’re just the same ones who’ve never liked him, or ‘don’t get him’,
or think he ‘can’t sing’, and any new Dylan album isn’t going to change their
minds at this stage. So, that’s why Tempest
is unreviewable.
However… (deep
breath) … in some kind of attempt at balance between the craziness and
redundancy of the extremes already outlined, let me try to continue the review
by positing a potentially fruitful line of approach. Insofar as it’s impossible
to judge this record in isolation from every other record Dylan has made (just
as it would not be beneficial to do so in relation to any other artist and
their oeuvre), that is, as though
you’d never heard anything else by him before (which, in this unique case might
well be ideal), let’s endeavor to imagine that it’s the latest release by any
other established singer-songwriter of roughly similar age and background,
contemporaries of Dylan’s like Kris Kristofferson, Gordon Lightfoot, Paul
Simon, etc.; and, in a like manner, let’s park the head-and-shoulders-above-anyone-else
masterpieces for the moment, and treat Tempest
like any other perfectly good Dylan album, which if anyone else produced it,
would be applauded as a damn fine record, like Nashville Skyline, New
Morning, Planet Waves, Desire, Street Legal, Infidels, Oh Mercy etc. (And isn’t it interesting
that when reviewers write of a new Dylan album being ‘his best since…’, there
is rarely any consensus about which album it’s his best since?)
Like last year’s Tom
Waits’ album Bad As Me, which kicked
off with a train song, ‘Chicago’, Tempest
starts with another upbeat ode to the rails, the trad jazzy ‘Duquesne Whistle’,
replete with Satchmoesque vocal timbre and inflections. It’s pleasant, but
feels ephemeral. Like many cuts on the album, if you’re looking for some
unifying theme, it deals with an uncompleted journey. This one may yet reach
its destination; others have been terminally interrupted.
‘Soon After Midnight’
is a tender love song, about not realising that the one you were looking for
was there all along, which plays knowingly with too-obvious Tin Pan Alley
rhymes: ‘It's now or never/More than ever/When I met you I didn't think you’d
do/It's soon after midnight/And I don't want nobody but you.’ It’s followed by
‘Narrow Way’, a jaunty, chugging blues. Bolstered by the fiddle of Los Lobos’
David Hidalgo, it borrows a chorus from the Mississippi Sheiks' 1934 ‘You'll
Work Down To Me Someday.’ It’s also a prime example of the too many incidences
of dourly repetitive riffing that mars much of the album, which overall is
lyrically fecund but musically unadventurous. Dylan has stuck rigidly to a now
wearily familiar musical template, his favoured mode remaining a slow, listless
shuffle. When this is combined with a tendency to let songs outstay their
welcome, and a continued reliance on stale, reheated blues riffs, it’s a recipe
for mediocrity. Plus, the band is not allowed nearly as much freedom as it was
on 2009’s Together Through Life, and
one misses the raunchier contributions of Tom Petty lieutenant, Mike Campbell
to that record. What’s more frustrating, however, is that this is still a
seasoned group of highly skilled musicians, who are not being permitted to
deviate from a stagnant pool of melodic and harmonic ideas. Just because they
are playing standard bar band music doesn’t mean they have to play it like a
standard bar band.
The next four tracks,
sequenced plum in the middle of the ten selections, form the core of the album,
and contain all that is best and most intriguing about it. ‘Long And Wasted
Years’, built around a lovely descending tolling bells guitar riff in the
turnaround, is an ostensible dissection of a long, stormy relationship or rough
marriage, as plaintive as ‘Shelter From The Storm’ as it last verse mourns: ‘We
cried on a cold and frosty morn/We cried because our souls were torn/So much
for tears/So much for these long and wasted years.’
‘Pay In Blood’ is
perhaps the angriest song Dylan has recorded since the romantic rage of ‘Idiot
Wind’, or at least since his un-P.C. defense of the state of Israel, ‘Neighbourhood Bully’. A funky, Stonesy
stomp, whose riff and rhythm recall ‘Hand Of Fate’, it’s the album standout,
because it puts some blood in the music. Even if the addressee, here as
elsewhere, remains exasperatingly nebulous (although, as with ‘Early Roman
Kings’ gangster bankers would be an educated guess), it’s good to hear the
snarl is back. On an album that only occasionally aspires to the flightiness of
Ariel, mostly in its beginning and ending, Dylan liberally lets fly with a few
choice epithets throughout, echoing Caliban’s ‘You taught me language, and
profit on it is, I know how to curse.’
The eerie ‘Scarlett
Town’ is a reworking of the traditional ballad ‘Barbara Allen’. With banjo and
fiddle to the fore, it has the stately cadences of the Gillian Welch song, from
last year’s The Harrow and The Harvest,
with which it shares a title. The creamy, analogue delay, Gilmoresque guitar
solo, which emerges near the end, is so surprising in the context of the rest
of this album, and even this particular song, that it comes as quite a shock,
albeit it a pleasant one.
‘Early Roman Kings’
is not the first song that has appropriated Muddy Waters’ ‘Mannish Boy’ riff,
and it won’t be the last, but at least it imbues it with a country twinge, and
has the novelty of David Hidalgo this time providing accordion accompaniment.
I can’t much see the
point of the love triangle revenge story related in ‘Tin Angel’, or at least
not when recounted repetitiously at its nine minute length. The lapidary old
testament vignettes on John Wesley
Harding do the same kind of thing with more forceful economy and
allegorical weight, making this bloated murder/suicide ballad a poor relation
to ‘Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts’, without the complex and colourful plotline.
And so we arrive at
the 14 minute, 45 verse title track, which is also the weakest cut here, the
gaping hole that should have been filled more discerningly, or else never let
set sail. The problem isn’t, perforce,
length: the long song has long been a staple of Dylan’s repertoire, from as
early as ‘A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall’, ‘With God On Our Side’, ‘Chimes Of
Freedom’, and ‘Ballad In Plain D’, to middle period extensions like ‘It’s
Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’, ‘Desolation Row’ and ‘Sad Eyed Lady of The
Lowlands’, to more recent examples like ‘Highlands’ and ‘Ain’t Talkin’. Indeed,
the exploding of the idea that ‘pop’ songs had to be short was one of the
paradigm shifts effected by the Dylan revolution. (Remember that ‘Like A
Rolling Stone’, although six minutes, three seconds long, was initially listed
as six, and released as a double A-sided single, so it would still get played
on the radio.) Rather, the trouble is
that so little is done with that 14 minute wide canvas. This time, more is not
more; or rather, it is, but not in a good way. (Probably some readers think the
same of this review.) The same lilting, 16 bar, waltz-time Irish melody
repeated ad infinitum, with little or
no variation, no revealing vocal ticks or technique, would get on anyone’s
tits, and invites the eventual salutary use of the skip button. The Titanic may
still sail at dawn, but this is no latter day ‘Desolation Row’, as Allen Jones
unwisely suggests, lacking as it does that magnum opus’ frighteningly
nightmarish imagery and surreally macabre cast of characters, and its edgy,
wracked performance. Admittedly, the watchman laying dreaming the Titanic is sinking,
while it actually is, is a cute conceit, but this is no brave new world that
has such people in it, rather a collection of stock characters. Besides, Magpie
Bob robbed that line from one of the many versions of ‘(The Titanic) It Was Sad
When That Great Ship Went Down’, which is noteworthy, as he usually pilfers
more extensively, and obviously, musically than lyrically. Check out renditions
of that fine old ballad, by William and Versey Smith (on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music), the
Carter Family, Leadbelly or Woody Guthrie, for a much more succinct meditation
on this defining maritime disaster.
Aside from all of which, I’m sure Bob Dylan knows that The Titanic was
sunk by an iceberg, not a storm, unless the general conflagration is what
constitutes the metaphorical tempest.
That leaves the
closer, the Lennon tribute ‘Roll On John’, another tale of an aborted journey,
which depending on your temperament, or even mood, can be described as
‘heartwarming’ or, alternatively, ‘mawkish’. At least it’s ‘better than’ The
Cranberries’ risible ‘I Just Shot John Lennon.’
A few more random
observations, before we close: 1). Perhaps it’s again stating the bloody
obvious, but Jack Frost, Dylan’s alter ego behind the console, would not be a
go-to producer. Zim’s dislike of the studio, and especially modern recording
methods, is well documented, but maybe it’s time he took a leaf out of his old
mucker Johnny Cash’s book, and gave Rick Rubin a call. Concerned as he is with
mortality, and specifically his own legacy, Cash’s example should prove
instructive about how Rubin (or someone else of his ilk) could help him
construct a dignified exit strategy. After all, Daniel Lanois brought a lot to Oh Mercy and Time Out Of Mind; 2). What is ultimately most appealing about this
album is not the songs, or the ensemble performances, but Dylan’s voice. In the
phrase ‘singer-songwriter’, more weight is usually attached to the second term,
ironically a result of Dylan’s contribution to popular culture in the first
place. But as Liam Gallagher has said of his John Lennon obsession, “It’s his
voice”, even more so than the fact that he wrote great songs. And by ‘voice’,
in relation to both Lennon and Dylan, we mean not just the sound they produce
with their vocal chords, the phrasing and timbre and inflections, but the grain
of the voice, in the way one speaks of a writer finding theirs. It’s not for
nothing that, however many great cover versions there exist of Dylan’s or
Lennon’s songs, people do tend to go back to the originals, or see them as
defining. Of course, everyone will tell you that Dylan’s voice is shot, and has
been for years. But it still remains a wonderfully expressive instrument.
Desiccated and time-ravaged as it is, there is still a nobility in how it ‘goes
on’, like an aged Beckett character with one foot in the grave, the woman in
the rocking chair in Rockaby,
fitfully intoning ‘More’. I wouldn’t be completely astounded if that croak
survives croaking; 3). I’d be interested in hearing anyone argue against the
hierarchy of unimpeachable Dylan classics which is an underlying assumption of
this review. Maybe we elevate and revere the accepted meisterwerks too much.
Maybe someone thinks the early folk albums were his pinnacle; maybe someone
prefers him as an MOR crooner; maybe someone else is of the opinion that his
late mature works are in fact his apogee, and he has been getting better all
along. That would recast the evaluation of Tempest
entirely.
So, there you have
it: the proverbial curate’s egg, a decidedly mixed bag. Which means it’s certainly
not up there with Blonde On Blonde,
but nor is it down there with Self
Portrait. Of his more recent albums, with which it makes far more sense to
compare it, it’s not as good as Time Out
Of Mind, but probably better than Modern
Times. Which means it’s a must have for Dylanphiles (as indeed any new
release from the man would be), but as one of the finer records of the year so
far, despite its flaws, is also of interest to the casual fan.
Our revels now are
ended. For the time being, at least. But one suspects that this riverboat
Prospero, like some Wizard of Oz shyster shaman, a trickster who is not
necessarily a charlatan – a character type which stretches back in American
letters at least as far as Mark Twain – has not quite abjured his rough magic,
buried his staff and drowned his book, just yet.
